"Gale Group Magazine DatabaseTM, File 47, is a unique general interest database that contains indexes, abstracts, and full-text records. Gale Group Magazine Database provides current and retrospective news from more than 400 popular magazines on such subjects as consumer behavior, media trends, popular culture, political opinion, leisure activities, and contemporary lifestyles. Gale Group Magazine Database also contains large collections of entertainment reviews and ratings of books, films, theater, concerts, hotels, and restaurants. This database is ideal for searchers who need background material and a variety of perspectives to supplement any business search. Gale Group Magazine Database includes indexes and abstracts for 400 publications and the full text for more than 250 magazines."
I searched for information about public school library finance or budget. I started with my first search criteria. I was receiving large numbers of results. I had to add several limiters to my search to help produce a smaller set of results. I tried the following limiters:
"/eng" for english only text
"/fulltext" for full text results
"/YYYY" for publication year ( this was an = only situation not <>)
"/short" for text less than 1,000 words
After using all of the limiters possible and all the search terms I still had a final search result of 61 hits. My first two results did contain my search criteria but the titles were not directly related to my search. The first was a book titled Fundamentals of Children's Services. The second was an article about the accomplishments of a mayor which included a reference to libraries.
The following screen captures show my final list of search strings, results, and cost of search.
My evaluation of this database was that it was very costly. For just about nine minutes of searching the cost was almost $17.00. One can only imagine what the cost of a search would be if you were unsure of your search criteria. The search was different because you did not see any result windows only result numbers. My goal was to reach a reasonable number of results to search for valid hits. I was focused on the number of hits my building blocks created during my search. I can see using this approach if money is not an object and one has also tried searching other databases so you have prior knowledge of the best search strings to be used with Dialog. The suggestion of looking at the bluesheets was helpful because it provided me with a listing of abbreviations and their meanings. This would not be a tool I would use with public school students due to monetary issues.
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